Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports forced cancellation of instance refreshes

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now enables customers to force cancel instance refreshes immediately, without waiting for in-progress instance launches or terminations to complete. This enhancement provides greater control over Auto Scaling group (ASG) updates, especially during emergency situations such as when needing to rapidly roll forward to a new application deployment when the current deployment is causing service disruptions. Customers can now quickly abort ongoing deployments and immediately start new instance refreshes when needed.

Instance refreshes are used to update instances within an ASG, typically when configuration changes require instance replacement. To use this feature, set the WaitForTransitioningInstances to false when calling the CancelInstanceRefresh API. This enables faster cancellation of the instance refresh, bypassing the wait for any pending instance activities such as instance lifecycle hooks.

This feature is available in all AWS regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, please visit Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling user guide.